However, choosing an object for that love is just the problem. As Origen explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, “it is impossible for human nature not to be always feeling the passion of love for something.” And he continued: “Some people pervert this faculty of passionate love, which is implanted in the human soul by the creator’s kindness. Either it becomes with them a passion for money and the pursuit of avaricious ends; or they go after glory … or they chase after harlots and are found the prisoners of wantonness and lewdness; or they squander the strength of this great good on other things like these [including their jobs, athletic skills, and even higher education].”72 This picture of a perverted self is very much like the restless and “fussy” self envisaged by Plotinus, a self that is placed only in relation to the material world and its enticements. Human love must be directed to the good, “and by that which is good,” Origen concluded, “we understand not anything corporeal, but only that which is found first in God and in the powers of the soul.”73
Unfortunately, the powers of the soul are not easy to harness. Frequently relying on scriptural animal imagery in order to picture the soul as a kind of menagerie, Origen argued that consciousness is multiple; it has “secret recesses” (arcanae conscientiae) and can “admit different energies, that is, controlling influences of spirits either good or bad.”74 The key to redirecting these inner powers is self-inspection, a probing of the false personae that make the soul “dingy and dirty.”75 Thus Origen called for a kind of reflexive self-seeing that is transformative: “If we are willing to understand that in us there is the power to be transformed from being serpents, swine, and dogs, let us learn from the apostle that the transformation depends on us. For he says this: ‘We all, when with unveiled face we reflect the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image.’”76
That the self is capable of such metamorphosis is due in part to its ability to read Scripture properly so as to discern the spiritual metanarrative encrypted within it. Proper reading was, for Origen, allegorical reading, which spiritualizes the material realities of the text, its “sensible aspect,” and at the same time spiritualizes the reader, who learns how to distinguish between “the inner and the outer man.”77 Learning how to make this distinction is crucial, because an allegorical reading of the biblical text “reveals a surprising and total isomorphism with the very structure of spiritual reality,”78 a reality that is not only cosmic but also central to authentic self-identity as Origen understood it. In a passage in his Commentary on John devoted precisely to what he there calls “elevated interpretation,” Origen wrote that “the mind that has been purified and has surpassed all material things, so as to be certain of the contemplation of God, is divinized by those things that it contemplates.”79 As Robert Berchman has argued, the purpose of this form of textual contemplation is “to foster the potential of intellectual self-awareness and so orient the self upon a path of self-knowledge that eventually leads to consciousness of the Logos.”80
As the book becomes spirit, so the person becomes book: one of Origen’s most powerful images of the self in relation to Scripture is presented as one of the figural meanings of Noah’s ark in the Homilies on Genesis: “If there is anyone who, while evils are increasing and vices are overflowing, can turn from the things which are in flux and passing away and fallen, and can hear the word of God and the heavenly precepts, this man is building an ark of salvation within his own heart and is dedicating a library, so to speak, of the divine word within himself…. From this library learn the historical narratives; from it recognize ‘the great mystery’ which is fulfilled in Christ and in the Church.”81 This “library of divine books” is the “faithful soul” who, by internalizing the word, begins to realize a touch of transcendence in the self. As Dawson has observed, “the allegorical reader’s necessary departure from Scripture’s literal sense parallels her resistance to the fall of her soul away from contemplation of the logos into body, history, and culture. But the equally necessary reliance of the allegorical story on the literal sense parallels the reader’s salvific use of her soul’s embodiment (by virtue of the prior, enabling self-embodiment of the divine logos).”82 Although by directing the attention of the soul away from temporal reality (“the things in flux”) and toward the divinity within Origen envisioned the self’s proper place as a cosmic one (“the heavenly precepts”), this does not mean that embodied life has no value. When the soul is “placed” in the context of a divine library, it is also placed with regard to the incarnation, as Dawson indicates briefly in the quotation above.
The full import of the image of the divine library can be seen in a remarkable passage from the Philocalia, in which Origen argues that “the word is made flesh eternally in the Scriptures in order to dwell among us.”83 That dwelling is not only the literal presence of the book among us but also the transfigured presence of Christ in us. Scripture embeds the incarnation in the world, but it also transfigures that world, as Origen went on to say: “those who are capable of following the traces of Jesus when he goes up and is transfigured in losing his terrestrial form will see the transfiguration in every part of Scripture” and will be transfigured themselves, since they have the key to the wisdom hidden in the text.84 No longer divided, then, the Origenian self is as expansive and as embracing of a transcendent structure of reality as the Plotinian self whose “head strikes the heavens.”
Origen’s connection of the Incarnation with Scripture and, by extension, with the reader whose self encompasses a divine library, would seem to dignify the body; indeed, Dawson argues vigorously that “his celebration of allegorical transformation of identity is a spiritualization, not a rejection, of the body.”85 Such a spiritualized view of human materiality, however, is hard to reconcile with a valorization of the embodied human being, the historical self: as Peter Brown remarks, for Origen “the present human body reflected the needs of a single, somewhat cramped moment in the spirit’s progress back to a former, limitless identity.”86 And, even though “body” would remain for Origen a marker of identity, it did so only as it was transformed into a spiritual body “gradually and by degrees, over the course of infinite and immeasurable ages.”87 Origen may have had a “heady sense of the potency and dynamism of body,” as Caroline Walker Bynum argues; but as she goes on to observe, his theory of the body “seemed to sacrifice integrity of bodily structure for the sake of transformation; it seemed to surrender material continuity for the sake of identity.”88 Thus although Origen shared with Plotinus a sense of a self touched by transcendence,89 he went one step further in spiritualizing the self by allowing even the body an eventual touch of transcendence.
From the Touch of Transcendence to the Touch of the Real
As I noted earlier, the ways of conceiving of the self that are the focus of this discussion can be located along a continuum, with the views of Plotinus and Origen representing a paradigmatic moment when the self is oriented toward the spiritual, sometimes at the expense of the material world. The later Neoplatonists and Christians to whom attention will now shift also privileged spiritual knowing as a central and defining feature of the self, but they did so with greater emphasis on, and valuation of, the this-worldly or material realm. Whereas Plotinus and Origen directed the gaze inward in order to orient the self “outward” to a transcendent spiritual structure, later thinkers did the reverse, directing the gaze outward in order to achieve inner vision.
The focus will continue to be on images in texts that can be